This invention relates to a method for dispatching air passengers between their arrival in an arrival zone and the boarding of an airplane, with check-in baggage checking and transportation from the arrival zone to an aircraft standing at the ramp, and an airport installation and vehicle suitable therefor.
Air passengers are presently dispatched so that the air passengers arrive at an arrival zone at the airport building and walk with their luggage through the airport building until they arrive at the check-in window or the baggage check-in counter. Even these two facilities may be at a distance from each other. Depending on the design of the airport, passengers are given a boarding pass at the check-in window which is surrendered at the entrance to the waiting room. In more modern airports, the check-in window is directly at the entrance of the waiting room. After passing through security checks, the air passengers remain in the waiting room for a certain time and are then loaded into buses and driven to airplanes waiting at the ramp or pass via telescopically extendable, covered walkways directly from the waiting room to an aircraft which has been taxied close to the waiting room building. In the meantime, baggage is being loaded on baggage vehicles, is taken to the aircraft and is unloaded there again and loaded into the aircraft.
All these operations require separate technical facilities and premises, all of which leads to the situation that modern airport installations require an enormous amount of money and that furthermore, boarding an aircraft is a time-consuming and disagreeable activity as compared, for instance, to boarding a train.
It, thus, is an object of the present invention to accelerate and simplify the dispatching procedure.